Tyron Woodley says he ‘didn’t have the financial incentive’ to heavily promote UFC 201

If it felt like Tyron Woodley wasn’t going out of his way to promote UFC 201, that’s because he wasn’t.

Woodley dethroned Robbie Lawler to became the new UFC welterweight champion at UFC 201, stopping Lawler with a memorable first-round knockout. However the lead-up to fight night was quieter than most pay-per-views, with Woodley even electing to answer nearly every question at UFC 201 media day with some variation of “I’m the best welterweight in the world,” apart from an interview he conducted with MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani.

And according to Woodley, there was a reason for that.

“I felt like, in general, the fight could’ve been promoted a little bit better,” Woodley said Monday on The MMA Hour. “We kind of got smashed in between UFC 200 and UFC 202. There wasn’t a ton of publicity and a ton of marketing done for the actual fight, and with that said, I wasn’t the champion at the time, so I didn’t really feel compelled and I didn’t have the financial incentive to really push the fight and go above and beyond.

“So I put all of my energy into my myself. They didn’t set me up to get to the Fast & Furious set. They didn’t set me up to meet with Dwight Howard and all of these guys. Those are relationships that I have built my own self, and I didn’t feel obligated, so why am I going to tell you three days before the fight ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this, I’m going to knock his head off?’ You’re going to see in three days, so you guys can be patient, the cage will lock, we’ll get into a fight and you’ll see. But I told you guys, I’m going to leave everybody’s mouth on the ground and everybody is going to be in awe and they’re going to be shocked. And that’s what happened.”

While the marketing for UFC 202 may have been lacking in Woodley’s eyes, the event’s outcome certainly lived up to expectations.

At the age of 34, Woodley stunned Lawler with a super-missile of a right hand to earn the fastest title win in UFC welterweight history. In doing so, Woodley became the first man since Nick Diaz in 2004 to finish Lawler with strikes, accomplishing a feat that …

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